Weapon-mounted rangefinders are weapon-mountable electronic devices that determine a range between a weapon and a target by utilizing a laser transmitter and receiver unit to determine the round-trip time it takes a laser beam to travel to the target and back. These can be particularly useful in military and hunting applications. For sniper applications in the military, a range determined by a weapon-mounted rangefinder can be provided to a ballistic solver that uses the distance along with other factors (e.g., bullet mass, velocity, weather conditions, etc.) to determine a ballistic solution that can be provided to a sniper to accurately aim the weapon before firing.
Because these rangefinders are weapon mounted, they are typically co-aligned (or “bore-sighted”) with the cross-hairs of an optical scope of the weapon, allowing the shooter to easily obtain a range of the target in the crosshairs of the optical scope. As such, and because weapon-mounted rangefinders are subject to high amounts of shock when the weapon is fired, these rangefinders may need to be bore-sighted fairly frequently. This can be done through a beam-steering mechanism that makes slight adjustments to the direction the rangefinder transmits the rangefinder laser beam. Problematically, however, lasers used to perform range-finding calculations typically operate at wavelengths invisible to the human eye.